Most of my thinking on the continuing brutality in Ferguson, MO. #Ferguson has been less about the protests themselves and more about what on earth the police might be thinking. Their behavior has been not just ruthless, but so consistently bizarre and they are clearly operating in a different world from everyone else. Their frame of reference has to be completely different from that of everyone on the outside.
But yesterday, after some short and inexplicable peace when the police took a breather, they were back at it, this time breaking out LRAD sound cannons, and I think I figured something out. Looking at the protest section of the Wikipedia article, a few of the American incidents have something in common: they’re protests organized against very large institutions. Two of the deployments were against a G20 meeting and against Occupy protestors. It was also deployed but not used at the 2004 Republican National Convention.
And here’s where I think the fault is: the Ferguson Police Department things that this is one of those. They think people are raging against the machine, and they just need to be scared away and everything will go back to normal, and the freaks will be beaten back into their little holes. What they don’t seem to fully understand is that the institution being protested is them.
But the situations couldn’t be more different. Take a protest against a WTO or G8 summit. The police are ultimately secondary antagonists, and instead of fighting the great power they came out to protest, the demonstrators end up focused on the police. (Which doesn’t mean their message is lost, but does mean their energy is being redirected.) And the job of the police is ultimately to distract the protestors and chase them away from the venue.
This is the first problem: you can chase people away from a convention center, but you can’t chase them away from yourselves.
Next up, say you’re an activist, and you’re in conflict with the police when you want to be protesting NATO. What is the cost of giving up? It means your voice will not be heard, and the drag you may have put on the proceedings will be lifted. But in the end, nobody ever thought the protest outside was going to immediately change the minds of the people inside making deals. It was about registering dissent, directing attention, fomenting debate, and making sure those people up at the top knew people weren’t happy. Going home makes it more likely that message won’t come through. But the odds were never really in your favor today anyway.
What happens if the protestors in Ferguson close up shop and go home? That’s complicated, and it’s the second problem. The police seem to think things would roughly go back to the status quo. They’re completely wrong.
First, the general point: giving up means submission. Like above, giving up means submitting to the world as it is. In Ferguson, the struggle is against the police themselves. Submitting specifically means submission to the police. This is new, and I don’t think they realize what they’re saying or what they’re asking for. They’re not asking you to cool down, or to go home. They’re asking you to accept them as your absolute superiors and they might not even know it.
There’s another big part of this, and it’s one that has been discussed more than the above, which is the fetishization of military force and the authoritarian power fantasy that comes with it. And, of course, they’re embarrassing themselves. Multiple veterans are on the record saying that this is never how things went down in Iraq and Afghanistan, that you didn’t use this kind of equipment, that you didn’t hold your guns out like that, that you followed a specific manual to deescalate conflict. These police haven’t been trained on any of this, so they treat the equipment like toys, and they act like they’re in a movie.
When you combine this with the long standing problems of American law enforcement, this quickly becomes a toxic mess. The biggest problem, to be totally obvious, is race. The second problem, which feeds directly into the first, is law enforcement’s insistence that they handle their own affairs and judge their own misdeeds. The result is an insular process that leaves them as the rearguard of American institutional racism. None of this is new.
What is new is how these two things add together, and hybridize into a terrifying and amoral beast.
And this monstrosity is what they want you to submit to. That’s why this is new, and this is what they fundamentally don’t see.
They are asking for a police state.
By deploying this high powered behemoth against unarmed protestors, demanding their submission, not to a national or international agreement, but to themselves, they are asking to become the supreme force of their community. They want to be free to take any action they see fit, to be free from reproach from their community, and they want to be free to put down opposition by any means necessary, with overwhelming power.
If they succeed in putting down the protests, it will be by breaking the backs of the movement, and eradicating dissent through sheer force. Like any authoritarian government. And they don’t see this at all.
How could this possibly end well for them?
(collected and expanded upon from my twitter)